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Thursday, 6 August 2009

Anonymous is Legion because they are many

Seeking a comment aggregator

There are a number of blogs where I leave comments and sometimes I would like to have some sort of comment aggregator that draws together all the comments I have left in different places so that I can follow the discussion, if there is any on the matter being commented on.

Generally, my comment would pertain to the subject matter and sometimes to comments written by others but usually on the context and content, very rarely on the person or personality – comments should be about ideas, hopefully.

The infinity comments

I do sometimes agonise about comments that end up as treatises such that you are in an infinity scroll trying to read the whole thing.

This is not helped by the fact that the commenting areas are not subject to the more granular formatting you find in the blog spaces, so people who do not punctuate their commentary end up with rambling text of literary or unstructured diarrhoea.

If I find I am going to make a rather long comment, I put it on my blog and have a URL link in place of my comment. It goes without saying that it is expedient to have your own blog as someone who posts comments because it helps people understand your thinking about issues.

Identities matter

What matters to me most is that I like to engage with people and where commenting systems offer the options for identifying oneself; the worst option to choose is to be anonymous when a name, a reference address, or even a pseudonym can be offered.

I was so irked about a slightly challenging comment recently that I responded thankfully to the pseudonym of the writer, but soon afterwards someone else castigated my comments but offered the identity of Anonymous.

Much as I naturally wanted to respond, I felt without an identity, I could well be whistling in the wind. Others however got engaged with this anonymous thing that I found myself writing another comment and that appears below.

My name is Legion

I don't know why anyone is giving this anonymous whatever any oxygen.

Someone without a clear identity cannot have a personality and a focus to engage with.

It reminds of the person Jesus met at the tombs and Jesus asked his name, he answered, My name is [Anonymous, sorry] Legion (Wikipedia), because we are many. {The man was demon possessed.}

Makes you wonder which one of the multiple personality Anonymouses masquerading as one person you are engaging with.

It is the simple reason why I rarely engage with people who are afraid to give their opinions a hand of who wrote it and a face of who said it {or a person of who is responsible for it.}

In real life, they will stand for nothing because they identified with nothing, don't make them relevant.

Sniper’s Alley

Anonymous came back later on to commiserate with my frustration, well I was not frustrated, having to deal with the anonymous is very much like walking down Sniper’s Alley and getting shot at by assassins, the question is how you defend yourself against a faceless, unconscionable and unprincipled enemy whose rules of engagement are completely slanted against you?

Except when you are in a totalitarian state where the freedom of expression is curtailed and those with independent opinions risk danger, there is no reason to be anonymous except where you cannot stand by what you have expressed – there could be no clearer expression of cowardice than that and for that reason the Anonymous must remain anonymous, their views invisible and the comments irrelevant.